Aside from the fact that he is good at football, we knew nothing substantive about Hernandez a month ago. Now we know too much.

According to the police, he tried hard to thwart their efforts to investigate the shooting death of Odin Lloyd. Hernandez, Lloyd and two other men went out on the night of June 17th{+.}{+ }Only three returned. One of the other two is now the state’s key witness against Hernandez, and has named him as the trigger man. The ostensible motive was that Hernandez was angered by the fact that Lloyd had talked to the wrong people in a nightclub.

Another friend is suing Hernandez for shooting him in the face during an argument in a car earlier in the year. He also rented an SUV that’s connected to a 2012 double-homicide after another nightclub confrontation.

If Hernandez is innocent, he is remarkably unlucky when it comes to friends, firearms and automobiles.

If he is guilty, this is on him and his choices. It has nothing to do with the National Football League or the milieu of professional sports more generally. Bad people do bad things. Most of them have jobs.

Patriots owner Robert Kraft was moved this week to offer an explanation for having employed Hernandez, though none was required.

“If this stuff is true, then I’ve been duped and our whole organization has been duped,” Kraft told reporters.

He shared a letter written to a Patriots staffer by Hernandez prior to being drafted, when the fact that he’d failed an NCAA drug test for marijuana had undercut his appeal.

Judging by the obscure language, it’s a decent bet the letter was in fact written by a lawyer. In it, Hernandez offered to undergo bi-weekly drug testing and to “reimburse the team a pro-rata amount for any failed drug test.”

It’s unlikely Hernandez was much of an operator. The hangers-on who stood to get rich from his success clearly were. They aren’t to blame either.

Nor are the Patriots, though they’ve gotten stick from some high-end quarters.

“New England tarnished its brand by choosing Hernandez twice (by drafting and then re-signing him),” according to ESPN columnist Ashley Fox. “Team owner Robert Kraft is to blame. So is coach Bill Belichick. They made the choice to gamble on Hernandez.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is a sophistry which is only ever applied to professional sports teams. When someone who works for the Hydro company does something awful, we don’t stand outside the gates of the power plant wondering, ‘Why didn’t you know?’

However much the Bible wishes it so, you are not your brother’s keeper. Your employer owes you no debt other than fair working conditions and a decent wage. All you owe back is good service. What you do in your off-hours is your own concern.

It would also be wrong to blame this on the NFL lifestyle. Two other men are co-accused with Hernandez in Lloyd’s killing. We don’t know what either of them did for a living, because it doesn’t matter.

When something terrible happens in the life of a high-profile person, there is an understandable urge to break things down to root causes. That is to say, to assign blame more widely than would be normal.

It always happens, and it’s very rarely right. The NFL and its teams hire based on the same principles as every other profitable business — seeking talent first, second and last. They aren’t the Kiwanis.

There is no moral expectation beyond what is and isn’t legal. That’s left to the courts to figure out.